Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

Aleksandr looked away, which is what everybody does. Then he looked back, and I watched him trying to harness the proper reserves of compassion and pragmatism and empathetic imagination so that he could formulate the right response. Announcements like the one I’d just made have a tendency to fluster and upset people, and their shock and bewilderment often become the central facts of the discussion. I’ve had a long time to think about Huntington’s, and they haven’t. But it’s true that I sometimes resent the way other people’s responses so often own these conversations, and I appreciated Aleksandr’s efforts to avoid making that the case.

“This will happen to you — soon?” he said. I could hear him keeping his voice careful and clear.

“This year. Or maybe next.”

“God.” He looked down. He took off his glasses and squeezed the skin above his nose, a gesture I’d seen him do often enough, and for mundane enough reasons, that I did not believe it to be affected. “God. Irina. I’m so sorry.”

It had always been a difficult thing to say to someone. I always felt guilty for ruining the other person’s day, and the other person invariably felt guilty if their day hadn’t been sufficiently ruined. I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies. I’m always confronted, quite horrifically, with my exact net worth in the eyes of the other person — whether they cry, or have to sit down, or pull their mouth into the expression of a frown even though their eyes are somewhere else.

“Christ,” said Aleksandr. “Are you afraid?”

I wasn’t sure anyone had ever asked me. People had called me brave, had assumed that there was a courage being exhibited when I smiled at things and showed up to work and brushed my teeth. I wasn’t sure that there was. I went to work for the same reason that a person with a gun to his head walks upright: there was absolutely no other option. I could have lain down and died, I suppose. But that was precisely what I was trying to avoid.

“Yes,” I said. “I am terrified.”

He nodded as though he knew that was the right answer. He picked up his fallen king and rolled it between his forefinger and his thumb. “This is what made you come here.”

It wasn’t a question, but I said, “Yes.”

“This is why you’re looking for all these answers about losing games and certain defeat.”

“Right.”

He put the king facedown on the table. “Let me show you something.”

He got up and reached for a large cigar box on the shelf above the desk. He sat down again with the box between us. He opened it, and out popped papers. There must have been hundreds — some were yellow and weathered, others were crisp and white, others were the kind of heavy cream-colored papers that one might reserve for the most important of business transactions. Some of the papers had handwriting — chicken scratchings in faded pencil; bold inky strokes that blurred into smears; the labyrinthine swirling of cursive Cyrillic, almost indecipherable for a person used to reading print — and others were typewritten. A few, ominously, were done with text cut out from magazines.

“What is all this?”

“Death threats,” he said. “All for me.”

“Oh.” I looked at him. I understood that he wasn’t trying to make me feel better — or worse, for that matter — but that he was only sharing with me a common reality. It was the taciturn exchange of reminiscences by veterans of some unwinnable war. It was the acknowledgment of the truest and most terrible thing about us — not the only thing but the thing that everybody else tried to ignore. “May I?” I asked.

“Please,” he said. “Go ahead.” I started to paw through them. I will hunt you down in the night and cut off your balls , read one. You are a traitor to your people and to your country , read another. Some were subtle — hinting at people and places Aleksandr should probably think to avoid — and others were explicit, explaining in lurid detail exactly how Aleksandr should be killed. Some looked amateurish and unhinged, and I imagined unstable people with matted beards writing by candlelight. Others looked professional and purposeful, and it was easy to envision a different kind of person: a person in a black suit, a person with the money and means to turn threats into reality. A person who wrote what he meant.

“Amazing,” I said, because really, it was. And then I said, “Are you afraid?”

He nodded too quickly, and I wondered if, like me, he’d been waiting for somebody to ask.

“I am,” he said. “I really, really am.” He folded the notes back up and stuffed them into the box with a care that bordered on tenderness. “But there’s fear and then there’s fear, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’re both afraid. But your fear is liberating. Mine is confining. Yours brought you here. Mine keeps me in this apartment.”

“It’s a nice apartment.”

He squinted at me. “Yes. A very nice apartment.”

“You go to your rallies. You go out. You take great risks.”

“I don’t fly. I don’t eat out. I talk to the Western press constantly, and why do you think that is? Not to give Larry King a good program, I promise. It’s because if I’m famous enough in the West, there will be annoying questions should anything happen to me.”

“That’s smart. That’s only smart.”

“And you?”

“And me what?”

“Whom do we tell if anything happens to you? Did you have anyone back home?”

I looked at him. I realized what he was asking. “Would I have left if I did?”

“Yes,” he said, and nodded slowly. “I am starting to think you would.”

That night it rained an unseasonable rain: mild and muddy, great sheets of water tearing from the sky. I took off my hat and then I took off my coat, and then, when I was halfway down the street of my hostel, I took off my shoes. Maybe I would get hepatitis. Maybe I would get pneumonia. For a moment I saw it as Aleksandr saw it: I saw the beauty, the nutty singular luck, of being alone and unaccounted for and barefoot, somewhere out in the enormous world. It was a blessing, perhaps, of a sort. It was like the free fall of the man with a broken parachute: we can’t know what he sees on the way down, when the sun angles in a certain way over the rolling landscape, and he reaches out to scrape the clouds. We can’t know what he learns in that otherworldly weightlessness.

But then I was in my bed, and I’d frozen myself thoroughly, and my situation seemed less romantic and more pitiful. I turned my face to the wall and folded all of my limbs into my body and tried to sleep. It was almost Christmas, I realized. Somewhere in the month behind me, I had turned thirty-one.

After that, Aleksandr and I were friends of a sort. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that there was a charge between us — an energy that was neither romantic nor sexual but was somehow more urgent than bland affection. We knew where the other person was standing in a room. We watched to see how the other person was taking certain information, certain jokes. We trusted each other all of a sudden, with our death threats and our diagnoses.